Embracing the Body’s Wisdom: A Guide to Understanding and Healing PTSD
By Jennifer Bennethum
PTSD can be an unseen wound. Opening a therapy door for a client carrying posttraumatic stress is like welcoming a guest whose suitcase refuses to close. Inside lie memories that replay with intensity, keeping the heart pounding in the hush of the night or immobilizing you during your everyday activities. For therapists guiding clients through these shadows as well as clients wanting to heal, understanding how trauma rewires mind and body becomes not just helpful but essential.
"PTSD is a whole-body tragedy, an integral human event of enormous proportions with massive repercussions." - Susan Pease Banitt
I met a veteran once, whom I’ll call Sam. He served in the military through multiple deployments and returned home haunted by flashbacks that struck without warning. Between sessions, Sam described pacing his living room floor as if searching for a booby trap beneath the rug, never quite safe, never quite free. It was here, in that constant unease, that the story of PTSD began to unfold—and where healing for him would one day take root.
What Is PTSD?
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), PTSD arises after exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. The American Psychological Association (APA) highlights that intrusive memories, such as nightmares or flashbacks, avoidance of trauma-related cues, changes in mood, and heightened arousal form the core of the diagnosis. As therapists, we learn early on that these symptoms are more than mere recollections—they are raw imprints of fear encoded deep within the nervous system.
I have had a client describe how the smell of disinfectant transported her back to a childhood emergency room where she witnessed her sister’s accident, and I saw how a seemingly benign scent can serve as a traumatic anchor. Our minds and bodies encode trauma in multidimensional ways, forming associations that can persist for decades if not addressed directly. That scent can be stored in your brain as a sort of memory.
Why PTSD Persists: The Brain’s Reluctance to Let Go
Neuroscience teaches us that trauma persistence is not simply a matter of willpower but of altered brain circuits. The amygdala, our threat detector, often becomes hyperactive in PTSD, sounding alarms even in safe settings. Meanwhile, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which normally regulates fear, can lose its calming influence, and the hippocampus—the brain’s context keeper—may shrink, making it hard to distinguish past from present threat.
In looking at Dr. Patel’s neuroimaging study, one service member’s brain scans lit up during a controlled re-experiencing task, showing how the circuits of fear had become locked in overdrive. He needed more than talk alone; he needed strategies that spoke directly to the body’s survival wiring.
This is where Polyvagal Theory becomes a beacon. Dr. Stephen Porges describes a hierarchy of neural circuits governing safety and defense. When the ventral vagal pathway is active, clients feel safe enough to connect and heal. If that fails, the sympathetic fight-or-flight response takes over, and if all else fails, the dorsal vagal freeze reaction can shut everything down. Helping clients re-access that ventral vagal state is crucial in rewiring trauma’s grip.
Who Can Be Affected: Beyond the Battlefield
While combat veterans are highly visible victims of trauma, PTSD spares no demographic. Approximately 6% of veterans experience PTSD in a given month, compared to 8% of female civilians and 2% of male civilians in the general U.S. population. Rates among refugees, first responders, survivors of sexual violence, and victims of child abuse can soar well above average, reflecting the brutality of prolonged interpersonal trauma.
Talking to a single mother fleeing domestic violence, she had related to me that her waking hours were haunted by the memory of being trapped in a car with her abuser. In the clinic, she could almost taste the fear whenever her son’s laughter echoed down the hall. PTSD crosses national borders, generational lines, and socioeconomic divides. It takes root wherever humans are made vulnerable.
Bottom-Up Approaches: Relearning Safety in the Body
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Pat Ogden’s body-centered approach helps clients tap into interoception—the internal sense of what’s happening in their bodies—and complete the defensive responses stalled in trauma. In one session with Sam, I invited him to notice the tension in his shoulders as he recalled a roadside ambush. When Sam gently nudged his shoulder forward, completing a defensive motion he had been unable to make in combat, his eyes welled with tears. In that movement lay the first step out of freeze.
Somatic Experiencing Peter Levine’s model guides clients to renegotiate the trauma in small, titrated steps, restoring flexibility to the autonomic nervous system rather than flooding it with narrative overload. With Somatic Experiencing, you can learn to track your heart’s rhythm, noticing how it flickers like a faulty light bulb in a safe environment. As she reported back from others about their bodily sensations, the terror loses a bit of its sting over time.
Yoga and Breathwork Research shows that trauma-sensitive yoga can reduce hyperarousal and intrusive memories by engaging the body in mindful movement. The simple act of flowing through a cat-cow pose while focused on diaphragmatic breathing helps to experience your body as grounded rather than constantly alert. In parallel, breathwork techniques such as box breathing or alternate nostril breathing provide physiological invitations into the ventral vagal state, turning the breath into a living bridge to safety.
Narrative Therapy Finally, once the body finds moments of safety, shifting to narrative therapy can help clients organize fragmented memories into coherent stories. By tracing her life from childhood to present, Maria reclaimed agency over her trauma story, reframing herself not as a helpless victim but as a survivor steering her own path forward.
A Story of Healing
See if you can picture…Antoine, a refugee who fled political violence as a teenager. Years later, he grappled with insomnia, nightmares, and a jaw that clenched so tight it left him with headaches. After getting brief psychoeducation about polyvagal states (three primary states of the autonomic nervous system: ventral vagal, sympathetic, and dorsal vagal, which influence our emotional regulation and social behavior), he practiced a simple 5-minute yogic breathing exercise that expanded his exhalations and soothed his jittery heart. Subsequently he wove in gentle yoga postures to ground him in the present, then rewrote his narrative in the safety of his living room. While Antoine still wakes at odd hours, his startle response has softened, and he speaks more easily about his earliest memories—once forbidden territory for him.
Antoine’s progress illustrates how trauma can erase our sense of safety over time, and how a combination of bottom-up practices can restore it.
Conclusion: The Journey Forward
Guiding a client or yourself out of trauma’s freeze response requires more than empathy alone. It demands neuroscience, mindfulness, and movement braided with the art of story. By honoring each individual’s neurobiology, cultural context, and personal narrative, we can offer and find a path to genuine recovery—one that speaks not only to the mind but to the body’s ancient wisdom.
Trauma may lie in the shadows of memory but hope lives in the gentle unfolding of those memories, guided by the safe hand of healing practices. May each therapist who reads this find renewed confidence in the power of bottom-up approaches, and may each client discover the courage to tell their story—one safe breath, one mindful movement, one rewritten narrative, at a time. Please let us know at Integrate Therapy and Wellness Collective how we can help walk with you on your journey of healing!
